#ReproMed10Years: Interview with Caitriona McPartlin

Caitriona-Blog

Continuing our celebration posts for our #ReproMed10Years, today we got the opportunity to learn more about our Chief Operations Officer, Caitriona McPartlin and her vision for the future and the values we stand for. She joined the ReproMed team in its early years and her career has developed at the same pace as the company has grown. Caitriona's passion and insight is fundamental to how we treat our patients and staff within the ReproMed group. 

As part of its new mission, ReproMed is striving to be a great place to be a patient and a great place to work; what does that look like to you?

It’s really simple. For ReproMed to be a great place to work, our staff have to have pride and trust in the company and the services we provide. A marker we have had for a long time is that if our team are confident enough to send their friends and family to us for fertility treatments, we know we are doing the job well.

We want to keep doing everything we can to make this a place where our employees feel respected, feel informed, feel involved, can progress in their careers, and feel confident doing their jobs.

For our patients, despite the fact that our pregnancy rates are really excellent, we are never going to be able to help them all to conceive successfully. However, if they are able to leave our clinic knowing that they have received the best treatment they could have, we did everything we could to help them,  and that they were treated with dignity and respect, I know that we are doing our job right.

Galway Fertility Clinic & BabyScan have recently joined the ReproMed family. How will that improve the service offerings for our patients?

Our vision for ReproMed is to be a place where we do everything we can to give our patients control of their reproductive health.

With the wonderful staff in Galway Fertility Clinic joining our team, we are now covering much more of the Fertility aspect of this vision and expanding our services across Ireland. By acquiring BabyScan, who provide predominantly antenatal scans, we moved one step closer to providing holistic reproductive care.

We have realised over the last couple of years that there is a real need in this field for people (women in particular) to be given control of their own bodies. Our ultimate aim is to be a healthcare company that provides information and access to every aspect of reproductive care from to contraception to egg freezing; from getting pregnant to giving birth, and right through to managing menopause. Any future acquisitions we make will move us further to our goal and complement our existing offering, just as Galway Fertility and BabyScan have done.  

We’ve updated our core values as a company to more closely reflect our beliefs. How will that impact patients and staff?

We have worked really hard for the last few months to build on Declan’s original dream for ReproMed and make sure it was one that all the management and staff would buy into.

The only way we can achieve our goals is if we all abide by our agreed core values or our ‘non-negotiables’ as we call them. Dignity, integrity, accountability, consistency. These are not meaningless platitudes and we have already started rolling out a number of initiatives to help to distil these values to all of our staff. We started an Employee of the Month programme recently and the results have made me realise that our staff really do recognise and value these traits in their colleagues. The more that this is rewarded, the better and stronger a team we will become.

It’s only natural that this positive mind-set will filter into the service that we provide patients. I have absolute faith that as we continue to improve, experiencing dignified, consistent care is what patients will come to expect when they walk through the doors, not only of ReproMed’s clinics but of any fertility clinic in Ireland. It will be a non-negotiable for them too, and ReproMed will be best placed to offer this to them.